Microsoft Talks About Spectre and Meltdown Patches Performance Impact

Microsoft states that older Windows versions such as 7 and 8 and servers will become slower after updates close the major vulnerabilities Meltdown and Spectre. However, most users with Windows 10 will hardly notice the performance difference on their PC after the security update, they say.

Windows 10 users with a PC from 2016 or newer, probably do not notice anything at all. Some users with Windows 10, but with an older chip from the Intel generation like Haswell or older, may notice a slowdown. Then a third category would be users with such an older chip and Windows 7 or 8, according to Microsoft, will notice a further reduction in the performance of their PC. Also, servers that run on Windows will have a "significant" performance reduction after the update, regardless of which processor used.

There has been a lot of discussion about Spectre and Meltdown since last week, Microsoft has something to say about Windows Systems performance after patching.

In general, our experience is that Variant 1 and Variant 3 mitigations have minimal performance impact, while Variant 2 remediation, including OS and microcode, has a performance impact.

Here is the summary of what we have found so far:

* With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don't expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds.

* With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance.

* With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance.

* Windows Server on any silicon, especially in any IO-intensive application, shows a more significant performance impact when you enable the mitigations to isolate untrusted code within a Windows Server instance. This is why you want to be careful to evaluate the risk of untrusted code for each Windows Server instance, and balance the security versus performance tradeoff for your environment.